The Relative Effectiveness of Active Listening in Initial Interactions

Abstract

Although active listening is considered an important communication skill in a variety of occupational and therapeutic fields, few experiments compare dyadic partners' perceptions of active listening with other types of listening responses. This study involves 115 participants engaged in interactions with 10 confederates trained to respond with active listening messages, advice, or simple acknowledgements. Results indicate that participants who received active listening responses felt more understood than participants who received either advice or simple acknowledgements. Further, participants who received either active listening responses or advice were more satisfied with their conversation and perceived the confederate to be more socially attractive than participants who received simple acknowledgements, although the effect sizes for these differences were small. Conversational satisfaction and social attractiveness did not differ between participants receiving active listening responses and participants receiving advice, however.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, November 2008, Chicago, Illinois. The data reported in the article is exclusive to this study.

Notes

¹The focal person in this analysis is the confederate, not the participant—each confederate, therefore, received at least three ratings of their social attractiveness, the degree to which their behavior produced feelings of understanding, and the degree to which interaction with them was satisfying per condition. See Jackson and Brashers (1994) for a discussion of research design using random factors.

²Sex of participant was included in the original analyses. Neither a main effect for sex nor a sex by condition interaction were found in the data for this study and were therefore dropped from further analyses in order to increase cell sizes and power.